


Machine on the Periphery

by AnonymousHeavyIndustries



Category: Free!
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Obsession, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-23 18:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19706707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousHeavyIndustries/pseuds/AnonymousHeavyIndustries
Summary: Is it fun being a machine? You haven't thought about it in a while.Is magic something that can be recaptured? You're not sure.All you can hope for is to see him again.





	Machine on the Periphery

He's nothing special, really. From a competitive standpoint, he's very good, but at this level, everyone has to be. If all you had to go on was the exhibition match times, you wouldn't bother thinking about it, but there is an unbearable weightlessness about him when he swims and for the first time in a long while, the water whispers to you. This is one of its beloved children, it says. You should take note. And as he trails at your heels, you see it. He doesn't tear the water, as competitors at this level so often do, but inserts himself gently between its curves. He glides. It is splendid, even when he loses as bluntly as he does.

In the hotel room, while Ralph scolds you about not packing, you lounge on a bed not long enough to hold you and remember through the enduring sting of chlorine the way his hips twist as he kicks.

*

Lucas hasn't made the trip with you. He doesn't travel overseas for events that don't matter. Too much of a hassle to get the wheelchair onto the plane, and a waste of time to boot. You're surprised he let you go at all. Perhaps it's because of all the fresh young meat coming in. 80% of them will drop out of the program within six months. He tells them as much during their first session and for some reason, they take it as a joke, or a challenge. Of course the best would be the hardest. You often find the ones who think that standing out at the bus stop in front of the natatorium crying at the realization that they are not good or special or irreplaceable before they stop showing up to practice and leave a new spot on the team that will swallow up another person who believes they are.

But you're hungry and that's irrelevant and Ralph found a 7-Eleven close to the airport so you don't have to pay convenience prices when you get there. The ready-to-eat meals haven't changed in the five minutes you've been staring at them, but the food is unfamiliar and you can't read any of the packaging and even though Lucas isn't here to comment on your eating habits, you can't quash the uncertain calculations rolling through your head. White bread sandwiches, stuffed buns, gleaming racks of fried foods—out of the question. Riceballs with mystery filling. Possibly high sodium soup. You heard there's a lot of sodium-rich dishes here. The bento look promising, but you refrain from reaching for one, knowing that whatever you choose will be wrong somehow.

As you tentatively settle on a bento with a fish you think is flounder, a little pigtailed girl bounces up and grasps your finger and starts jumping up and down shouting, "Yōsei-san, Yōsei-san!!" before her mother swoops in to retrieve her and apologize in fragmentary English. Ralph, tired of waiting, picks up the bento you'd reached for and pays for it himself.

When he looks up the word in the airport, he laughs and shows you the screen. Faerie. And you suppose it's appropriate enough. Before you were Odin, when you roamed the forests around Grandma's house, you swam in the streams and lakes with your magic fiddle, playing to an audience of beasts.

Ah. That was it. That was why the water had talked again. He was a faerie, like how you used to be.

Ralph tugs you along as the line creeps onto the flight bound for Stockholm and you don't mind. You didn't think that they existed anymore, but there he was, plain in the flesh. Each step down the narrow aisle presses a needle into your chest. Already you want to see him again, bask in the magic of his freestyle. If you ran right now, Ralph wouldn't stop you. The tickets were nonrefundable and he wasn't about to suffer the tonguelashing Lucas would give if both of you got waylaid. Just you being gone was manageable. He stands back at your assigned row, and though you pause, you slide in next to the window and watch the ramp rats wave their signal batons on the tarmac.

Grandma always scolded you on the days you stayed out past dark. She stood at the riverside as you pulled up fistfuls of fertile black mud and weaved rivergrass in your hair, shivering at a cold you couldn't feel, and told you the same thing every time:

Never swim with faeries.

*

You know his friends by name now. Rin, Asahi, Ikuya, half a dozen more. He doesn't have a social media presence of his own, so you watch him surface in the fringes of group photos, graze at shared meals, relent to coercion to play basketball and go shopping and engage in other common modes of young adult recreation, then disappear back into the digital abyss. Makoto is your favourite. It's because of him you have half the pictures you do, though it's often only a glimpse of fingers or an elbow just barely in frame next to a bowl of udon.

Sometimes you think about contacting Makoto and asking him for his phone number, but it's been two months now and if there was an appropriate time to do that, it had long since passed. So you cherish those elbows and fingers and abstract dolphin emoji references, curating them in a folder with a boring name that won't get checked when Lucas confiscates your phone, awaiting the next time he comes up for breath.

*

Lucas isn't big, but his voice booms loud as a bittern, and he can throw—hard. As the clipboard bounces off your chest, you again think if he hadn't been a swimmer, he would've been a pro at shotput. The board is followed by a monogrammed fountain pen, a bottle of painkillers, a stack of paperwork, a stoneware coffee mug featuring the logo of your top sponsor, and it's only when he launches the softball-sized marble paperweight his daughter bought him for Christmas that you deign to sidestep. It makes a dent in the door that matches the dents that came before it, then drops harmless on the carpet. In the corner of your eye, you catch Ralph's figure passing the window cutout spidered over with old cracks. Probably wanted to ask something, but he won't now. Lucas wasn't in an answering mood, though that was nothing new.

He tells you you're useless, with the whys and hows of your uselessness described with the painstaking detail he uses to craft your training regimen. The words wash over you like a noxious breeze and you sink back into thoughts of faeries. He must be doing his morning swim right now. You wonder what his schedule is like. Before you went to Japan, Lucas told you that Japanese training was absurdly inefficient, that it was a miracle they didn't burn through all their talent before they were out of high school. Mindless repetition of the basics. The blind assumption that doing something long enough would produce meaningful results rather than being exceptionally practised in doing something badly. Only now starting to take weight training seriously, their bizarre aversion to building muscle mass, no respect for rest periods or

_It doesn't matter if you want to swim or not. I tell you to swim, you swim. You go in and you don't come out until I say so. Swimming only when you want to isn't how you win. You're thirteen already. This isn't kid shit anymore._

Japanese training must not be so bad if he can still swim the way he does. Or maybe he's not been converted yet. That took time, and a dedicated coach. Going in too hard too fast resulted in a program with an 80% force-quit rate. But when they cared, they could go slow. A snippet of code here, a fine-tuning of gears there. Years could pass with you thinking everything is fine, then one day you find yourself sitting amongst your teammates in a coffeeshop and realize that if you pulled your head open right now, it would be full of circuitboards.

Lucas throws more pens at you. You attempt to better provide the illusion of paying attention.

It's comfortable, in a strange way, to know you're a machine. Machines functioned within predetermined parameters. Input pattern, output result. Consistent results, to be precise, and consistency was key. Every great swimmer you'd faced had been converted. You used to think perhaps you were different, that your memory of mud and music was not some fantastic faux nostalgia, but even when you attempt to escape it in games, you impose the program on yourself. Hours in training mode, hours in online competitive, indexing tier lists and counters, honing frame-perfect inputs. Is it fun? It's hard to tell.

Lucas tells you to clean up the papers scattered on the floor and you do so without bothering to tell him that you feel unwell. He thinks it's an excuse to slack off. Come evening training, you swim until you vomit, rinse out your mouth, then swim some more. Your 200m free is the same as always, down to the millisecond.

*

The picture is posted at 23:40 their time, with a caption that Google Translate mangles into an approximation of _'Studied too hard.'_ He slumps across a table with a pen in hand, thumb still on the butt as if frozen in midclick. A lazy blue line squiggles from the exposed tip across a page half-filled with indecipherable runes. There are textbooks beside him and a blanket draped across his shoulders. He is asleep.

The smothering force that crushes in your chest gives way to an excruciating lightness that threatens to elevate you from your loveseat and drive you into the hallway screaming running tearing the skin from your skull. You dive into the ocean and go straight to him. No time passes, you arrive in Makoto's apartment in an instant and carry him home, under the lily pads, into the deep, and hold him close, so you can feel his magic in you.

Beautiful _Yōsei-san._ Does he think about you? Or is a machine no good?

Was it special for him too?

_Yōsei-san._

You look at him until your eyes hurt and you have to go outside and walk around until they don't anymore.

*

Ralph interrupts the next time Lucas takes you into his office, fabricating an off-the-cuff query about modifications to his diet plan, which sets Lucas to calling him an idiot and telling him to ask the dietitian, but even so he can't help but pull out Ralph's folder and grumble about improvements that could be made, seriously they paid a guy for this crappy menu, a degree was supposed to mean something, and you slip out unnoticed. He doesn't ask for anything, but you go to the grocery store and load up a handbasket with everything that's his kryptonite and give it to him on rest day. He's not allowed to eat it, and neither are you, but it's the thought that counts.

*

You marvel at the redness of it as it trickles down your arm. The leeks remain uncut on the board as living wetness drains from the split in your finger. The tap gurgles cold, welcoming music into the sink.

Not a machine after all.

*

You beat your personal best. Lucas cares more about your form being awful. The water tells you that what you did was proper.

*

The bricks of the natatorium shiver when you pass them. You watch them, their trembling, and see them to be light as air. Ghostly vertices intersecting on a fragile plane. One touch would blow the whole building to pieces. Teammates pass you by as you stand there, holding your breath, afraid to break it. When Lucas asks where you are, they don't tell on you. They have no grudges. The bricks won't solidify even with their passing. Part of you wants to blow it up. Just because you could.

The sky saturates into a pernicious blue and the bricks shiver harder. They are freezing. They are scared. You can't be here. You don't want to hurt them.

You turn and run under the frightful sky. Everything is bright here. Everyone you see is wonderful. You can't help but smile. Running turns to frolicking, skipping over the pavement, deliciously wonderfully alive. You float through the city, curving around pedestrians, knowing they are good people, drift to a halt in the middle of a giant white and grey keyboard because the sky has changed colours again and it is bright now too, intense as the sun itself and you gaze upon it in its pulsing, manyfired splendor, oblivious to the honking of the glassmetal beasts. Someone shoves you back onto the sidewalk.

*

"Is everything alright?" Ralph asks over fika. "You've been acting weird lately."

"You always say I'm weird," you remind him, picking at your cardamom bun. In the window behind him, trees dance in the still air. He leaves it at that.

*

When you go home, things are gone. TV, fightstick, laptop, books, anything that isn't pure decoration or utility. There's a note magnetized to your fridge. _Get it together._ You're not angry. Lucas pays for the apartment anyway. If he wants to take stuff, so be it. You don't need it anyway. The most important thing sits in your pocket, your handheld gateway to Tokyo. You arrange your magnets into arcane shapes, then go to water your plants. You've been growing irises. You think he will like them.

*

The waters of Norrström surge around you, pulling you deeper into its heart. Your bare legs sway in the current, keeping you upright, but you don't intervene any more than that. On the banks sleep clusters of ducks and swans made grey in the darkness. The trout must be sleeping too. You curl your hand into a familiar old position over your forearm and draw a long, sonorous note out of the air. Relief spills from your soul and your bow sweeps back in a low note that resonates in your bones. Even a continent away, he can hear you. In the distance you see him, an indistinct humanlike shape split by the water rising up. His gaze sweeps over these foreign waters, then fixes on you. He beckons the Japanese way, and Norrström rushes forth, pulling you into his embrace.

****

It's dawn in Japan. Blue light spills across your bed as your phone renders the image of him sleeping at Makoto's table. You're not supposed to interact with any screens within two hours of bedtime to maximize sleep quality, but Lucas isn't here to stop you. You prop the phone up higher on the bed rail to bring him as close to level with you as you can get it, diligently touching the screen as it dims to keep him here, with you. The honey coloured moon cloaks itself in a sea of clouds and there is no light but him—this faerie, your ruin.

**Author's Note:**

> Another Albert story written in short order. Motivation factor high. Please thank @yuzuru_ru_ru's eagle eyes for [soft-confirming Lucas' name](https://fusetter.com/tw/vqiW0) so he's not a faceless entity. [But also for contributions to AlHaru in general.] Lucas/Lukas usage in Sweden appears more or less evenly split, so we'll have to wait and see what KyoAni opts for inre official spelling.
> 
> Criticism is not only welcome, but encouraged, and helps me create better content in the future. Thanks for reading.  
> 8 July 2019  
> \- 匿名重工業


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